


for you, i'd do it all over again

by MiniInfinity



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Parents, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Writing & Publishing, Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Drinking, Heavy Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Injury, M/M, Smoking, wonwoo is like a god here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:28:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25013974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniInfinity/pseuds/MiniInfinity
Summary: Jeon Wonwoo is the name everyone fears. Between reincarnations, he talks through with every soul on Earth until their time is up.But this story isn't about Jeon Wonwoo.This story is about Lee Seokmin and Kwon Soonyoung, a pair of marionettes in his schemes.
Relationships: Hong Jisoo | Joshua/Lee Seokmin | DK, Kwon Soonyoung | Hoshi/Lee Seokmin | DK
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28
Collections: Enduring Dawn Round 1





	for you, i'd do it all over again

**Author's Note:**

> please be careful and read the tags and warnings
> 
> also a big thank you to the mods and bless them for hosting this fest for seokmin!! :D

_Life: 0_

Summer bathes his skin in hopes and dreams of something new this time around. Seokmin _did_ pack most of his drawers and closet from the apartment he shares with three other guys in the same company to come back home from the city, to alleviate the strain on his eyes from staring at his computer screen and rest his throat from all of those presentations he was forced to give.

Before he left, each of them threw him cautionary advice, all about the possibilities of being thrown into those reincarnations they high school and university days all forewarned them about. The clap on his back that it can be anyone from his hometown that he has never met before. The heavy sigh of truth that when he comes back from this vacation, he will return as a completely different person, unrecognizable in character and the scars all over his heart. The hushed-out rule of never asking how many lives the other person has, if he and that person match in numbers and they just have to play with luck to figure out which ones to end up with. The risk of having a life cut short or completely taken away.

There’s also the fact that the person running the whole circus of reincarnations will be understanding if you get angry with him.

When Seokmin chugged coffee for that extra required classes on reincarnations, he thought it wouldn’t be so bad being those less-common cases, the ones where people don’t have anyone they’re being tested with. He thinks he wouldn't mind that at all.

The train ride from the city to his home is short enough to stop himself from slipping into a deep slumber at the seat. With clothes and books filling up a duffel bag, the drop-off for the bus stop and the extra kilometer to the actual roof he calls home isn’t so bad, either. He hops on his toes, just enough to graze his periphery over the gates and towards the front door, until he hears his mother shriek and nearly drop the metal bowl of strawberries in her hand.

“Seokmin!” rings throughout the garden, between tomato vines and stalks of lilies. He hears the smile in her voice as she speeds through how long its been since he last visited home, how much everyone missed him here, and that his father will be coming home from work soon, “He’s helping with payroll today, so let's give him another hour.”

Palms basking at his cheeks, soft as always, he needs to lower himself for her lips to peck his cheek, his forehead. He pinches his smile and closes his eyes, allows his mother to kiss him as many times as she wants.

He may be twenty-five, but he still misses his mother all the same.

“I asked your dad to buy some meat from the market,” she adds on, hooking her arm into his on their way to the front door. “Are you tired, Seokmin? Your room is the same way as you left it; maybe you can sleep a little before your dad comes home.”

____

When he wakes up from his nap, his phone tells him it’s already ten in the morning, and he missed out on waiting for his father to come home. A message from his father, a picture of him sleeping on the bed sometime last night, has him rubbing most of the sleep from his eyes but not the grin off his face for the caption, _Didn’t want to wake you up_

If his mother continued the same schedule as the last time he left, she must be filing away at her own job. His father must be at work, too. He showers the long ride home and heads to the kitchen, where his mother laid out breakfast for him already on the counter, a note of _Eat, Seokmin. We’ll eat more tonight!_ in her precise, welcoming handwriting he always knew.

When he opens the gate for his mother, she tells him there’s another person they want to invite over for their first dinner together, a neighbor who’s been helping them out while Seokmin drills himself in his studies. His mother asks if he remembers Kwon Soonyoung from his childhood years, the one who lived a few houses down before he moved somewhere closer to his sister's school. His mother raises her eyebrows at him, expectant of an answer, and Seokmin's nod wears out as his mind sifts through the memories of many years ago. He doesn't know the Kwon Soonyoung of now but with the two of them back together like this, he thinks it wouldn't hurt to take a step backwards from the label of strangers and something closer to acquaintances, or perhaps even friends before he has to send himself back to work in the city.

"When I told him you're coming to visit, he was excited to see you again," his mother pipes as she rinses carrots he starts peeling for her besides the sink. “It's been so long, hasn't it?"

Seokmin's nod rusts a second time. He feels bad that his heart doesn't leap as high or as far to see Soonyoung again, and it never helped that the last time they saw each other ended with tears, a broken promise of keeping in touch.

Kwon Soonyoung, sitting across from him at the low table, just the other side of the portable grill, is all sharp eyes that freeze him in worries of stepping out of line. His eyes are nothing short from what his memory gathers from all those years ago, but he looks paler around. His cheeks have worn away the chubby cheeks he's so used to greeting him when he was five years old. His feet wriggle for something to do, to ease the awkward air between them, because after all those years, Soonyoung still hasn't mended that promise, and he doubts he even remembers it.

But Soonyoung's eyes soften above the crooked smile on his face, and he can’t help but become a mirror for him.

The smile is all it takes, along with his parents standing up to grab a couple more plates and pitcher of cold water, for Seokmin to tell him, “Thanks for looking after my parents.”

Soonyoung nods, like a duty ingrained in him, like no burden at all. “They look after me, too.”

As they share the task of washing dishes together, he learns that Soonyoung moved back into his old home a few houses down not long after Seokmin left for the city. The age gap of one year must have played something with it, since Soonyoung returned home after graduating university. He offers to walk Soonyoung home to help with carrying leftovers, offer company and to get to know how much the place he called home changed, just exactly how much Soonyoung changed.

____

The next time he sees Soonyoung comes sooner than he expects. He’s not prepared to see Soonyoung hauling in bag after bag of groceries into the kitchen the first thing in the morning. His mother explains that Soonyoung buys their groceries for them sometimes, that all he needs is a list of what to get and the money to buy them, and there’s nothing else to worry about.

And they fill each other in with the lives they missed out on beginning from Soonyoung at six years old, when he began to grow fond of a second home. When they were younger, Seokmin swore the older would become a taekwondo champion, the pride of the nation. So when Soonyoung admits he remembers Seokmin telling him the same thing, admits his current job is nowhere near that, he doesn't stress it out. Soonyoung currently works as a physical therapist and is taking time off for his stress, decided that there's no other way to get his mind off it is by staying closer to home most of his days.

"What about you, Seokmin?" Soonyoung offers the question back to him. They make it to Soonyoung's home and settle at his front steps there, glass bottles of soda refreshing to his tongue.

Seokmin fills him in with his job that turns him into business, behind-the-desk job that requires too many numbers all at once, but he enjoys the challenge, the frustration of not knowing exactly where those numbers will be heading off to but trying to predict them down to the decimals.

At the end of Seokmin's answer, he realizes they're both much different than what they remember, what they want to believe. Strangers almost, but not quite.

____

Starting his days with Soonyoung becomes more of a routine than anything else since he returned home. He catches his mother’s faint smirk on her face as he walks around the house to look for the key to the bathroom because his father accidentally locked it somehow. When they meet eyes, when Seokmin brings out the key from the drawer, he stops his tiny celebration for the expression on his mother’s face.

“What?” he asks through a nervous smile.

“You and Soonyoung are spending a lot of time together again,” she eases out softly.

He shrugs. He blames it on the time lapsed between their last meeting and the present, how they're at least twice as tall and more than four times as old as they last remembered. He asks if that’s a bad thing, but she shakes her head and tells him to enjoy the day with him.

Soonyoung settles at a picnic table in front of someone's house, not exactly the one he lived in before and the one he moved back into recently. A neighbor he never knew owns the house, and he watches Soonyoung comb through the little girl's hair, continues on the conversation above him as if he doesn't have a child sitting on his lap. When he does look away, looks down to catch her drooling onto her bib, their eyes meet on his way back up, and Soonyoung waves him over.

"He was my best friend when we were kids," is Soonyoung's way of introducing him to the neighbor, Saetbyeol, and he's not sure why the past tense hurts something in him.

Saetbyeol says Seokmin is free to hold her daughter, to not be shy just because Soonyoung is holding onto her. Rawon is turning one soon and with her energy spiking, Saetbyeol admits that she’s thankful Soonyoung comes over to play with her sometimes.

But the offer ends with the energy depleted out of the baby girl. Rawon falls asleep in Seokmin's arms, cradled in a lullaby that's interrupted only by Soonyoung's, "You still like to sing?"

"' _Still?_ '"

“You sang when we were kids,” Soonyoung supplies, reaching over to unbutton her bib from her neck and placing it aside.

He chances a look at him from the corner of his eyes as Rawon shifts in his arms. “You still remember all of that?”

Soonyoung smirks. "Of course I do. You were the best singer my kid self ever heard."

He feels awful that much of his memories about Soonyoung are swept under the rugs in his life.

He takes his time strolling around the neighborhood at night. On his way back home, he stumbles upon Soonyoung sitting on the front steps of his porch, knocking back a green bottle by himself. When he waves at Soonyoung, the older raises the bottle above him in the air in a greeting before patting the spot beside him. When he takes up the spot, though, he watches Soonyoung slip into the door and inside, returns back out with another bottle and hands it to Seokmin.

"Six-year-old me never thought I'd be drinking with Seokmin," eases out so seriously between them that Seokmin cracks at his demeanor, almost sputters the soju around the rim before he can gulp it down. "I'm serious, Seokmin," but the squeak of his name out his lips refuses him from following his words.

"You didn't even know what drinking was at six."

Soonyoung juts his lips out before it forms into a pout of thought. "But I'm right, right?"

He finally gets the feel of alcohol down his throat. "Yeah," he sighs defeated, grin lingering as he places the bottle between his feet, "yeah, you're technically right."

____

With the clouds barely crossing the horizon behind mountains, he heads over Soonyoung’s house this time because his mother wanted to give him some of their breakfast. Containers in his hands and the path at the back of his hand, Soonyoung greets him with a slight scowl across his eyes and pout at his lips, shocks of his hair from waking up so soon.

Seokmin tries not to laugh because he’s seen this before but years ago. And even after all of these years, Soonyoung still wakes up with the same words of _Can you wake me up later?_ over his face and the sun beating down his skin. Soonyoung opens his door wider and invites him inside, promises to pluck some fruit from the back garden and ensure that Seokmin leaves with them.

And Soonyoung's childhood home is exactly how he remembers--the plaques of taekwondo competitions engraved with Soonyoung's name, marker stains against white from when he and Soonyoung flattened construction papers on the walls and used that as a table, the same glass cups and white mugs lining up at the drying rack. It's a jump into the past, and Seokmin wants to ask if time can't spare him enough to alter his home or if he simply doesn't have the heart to.

"Hey," Soonyoung calls out from his kitchen window. When he looks out to the world, they wince against the shard of lightning, clap of thunder. "You should probably wait out the rain."

The underlying premise of being childhood best friends must serve them this kind of closeness, Seokmin thinks. Waking up besides Soonyoung scratching his head because when they were kids, when they threw in "best friend" instead of the other's name when describing each other, sleeping besides Soonyoung wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Asleep on the floor, the couch, nowhere close to Seokmin's or Soonyoung's beds when it was time for a nap.

He's not exactly sure why his heart skips a beat or two when Soonyoung sits up, shirt still caught in the fit of sleep and the hemline sinking lower down his chest. He lets the darkness of the room form the outlines of Soonyoung sitting up at the edge of the bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, before heading out of the bedroom and into the hallway.

But being twenty-five means standing out in the rain, umbrella abandoned and lost behind the gates to his home. Not a single soul harboring in the rain, not even a speck of headlights in the midst. He closes his eyes, lets the rain trickle everywhere his skin allows and through his clothes. When he opens them back up, Soonyoung stares at him between the scowl viewing into the sheets of rain, damping down his hair above his eyes.

And he can’t read what the older is thinking, can’t pick out the message in his eyes.

A tug of his shirt forward, the rain can’t stop his hands from wandering far from the line between friends and acquaintances as he slips his hands over the back of Soonyoung’s neck, the person he once swore as his best friend before trickling away into strangers. But his hands don't falter when they reach the border of skin and short strands, for someone who became much more than that. The rain slips into crevices, even the ones between their lips when they part for a split second.

Seokmin looks all over his face, whispers a quiet, “You’re going to get sick, Soonyoung.”

He feels Soonyoung’s smile against his lips at the second kiss.

“Maybe I should have waited until we got inside,” Soonyoung’s chuckle falters just as a shiver runs through his spine. Bundled up in a thick blanket, hair wet this time after taking a hot shower and borrowing Seokmin’s clothes as their wet ones hang on the racks, Seokmin thinks it won’t be too bad.

Bundled in his own blanket because sharing a blanket means kicking into each other’s space for the warmth of wool, Seokmin smiles, ducks his head from his sight.

____

Every time they meet, whether it’s Soonyoung dropping by a bag of vegetables or to call Seokmin over to help, they sneak in a peck or two, on the cheek or straight on the lips, sometimes bringing his hand up when they can’t make it look too obvious. The list of groceries to buy becomes wordless conversations between them. With his mother asking him to write down what to buy from the market, he misses some items on the note, _Soonyoung_ littered across the sticky note and between items. He shoves the bashful blush down his neck when he asks if she can repeat it one more time.

  
  


Summer rains continues to pelt all around the periphery of the shared umbrella. They should have brought two, but from the hurry to the store before it closes and the precarious shoves of his slippers on, there was no room for that thought at all. Walking down the sidewalk, plastic bags swinging at their sides, from the corner of his eye, he catches Soonyoung glancing all around them. For what, he’s not sure.

Closer to home, Soonyoung points at the center of the road, to a soccer ball of one of the kids’ in the neighborhood. He feels Soonyoung press the handle of the umbrella into his hand and watches him step into the depth of the road with an “I’ll bring it back” over his shoulder.

He waits at the side of the road for Soonyoung. Guards him as he crouch down in the rain and gather the ball in his arms, letting the grocery bag slide down to his elbow. But between the sheet of rain, he barely makes out the car coming in the dark.

And just like that, he doesn’t know if the “Soonyoung? _Soonyoung!_ ” out his lips is loud enough for him to hear, doesn’t know how far he dives into the road.

_Life: -1_

When Seokmin catches his reflection, it’s in passing of the notebook-sized mirror for soldiers who can delve that few-second luxury of peace from a mere distraction. The face staring back at him resembles nothing like what he’s used to seeing waking up everyday. His forehead spans wider than what he remembers and the wrinkles above his eyebrows refract memories of his grandfather more than his own. His eyes droop at the corners, perhaps from the weight of the lifeless bodies and constantly fighting the humidity over his brows and all over his face. He hovers still fingertips over the scratches on his cheeks, some sawing far deeper than blood and bone. And he wonders where all these marks tracking up his skin came from, why they don’t signal his veins for any care.

The vacancy of a top tooth is taken over by blood dripping from his gums when he parts his lips, and he presumes not too much time passed since he lost it in the first place. A gash runs across his other cheekbone, blood long dried and skin browning already. One glance down, his white uniform blends into shades like the bandages someone yells about to replace, that the blood drips nowhere else but the ground.

The blanket and plastic grazing the crown of his head every step he takes rattles under the boom from afar. Cots lined up against the perimeter shake around his feet, all occupied with groaning soldiers--some begging for their mothers and others just wishing a return home, dead or alive. As one of the very few in here donning white uniform, he mimics the only other white-donned person here. He presses his palms onto wounds, wraps bandages around sliced legs or arms, tries to feed those who can’t do it themselves because they surrendered the strength, will to eat, or their own arms to do so.

Toeing around vomit, feces, blood on the ground, makeshift rice bags barely stable enough to keep the dirt from crawling right through, the length of his foot can trace out dirt and shrapnel, bullet shards and bone picks. And somewhere under his feet might be his tooth. He stops at his steps for a second, questions how long he’s been here to get used to it all.

He barrels over to the other side of the tent, gray light opening up from the split of blanket and plastic, as a nurse hauls a soldier in, an arm around his waist and another clinging onto his hand. She calls him over a name foreign to his own ears, curses daggering straight at him for just standing there when he should be helping her.

“ _Hwesung_ ” clamps the sound of the bullet right between her teeth.

Seokmin grabs the soldier by the legs instead of by the shoulders when he catches his arm sewing itself to its socket like a seamstress’ revenge, ripped uniform caught in the carnage of ripped skin, ripped breathing. After setting the soldier on a cot, he wipes at his own face, the sweat above his lips and the dirt under his eyes. One better scan at the soldier, he thinks life would suit him much better and more fair if they could cut off his right arm and leg.

Barely a handful of beats upon laying the soldier out, the nurse reaches out with her two fingers, presses them against the man’s neck. The scowl on her face hardens with the fan of her hand off the soldier’s neck, and everything left in his stomach starts to pool its way back up.

“We have to carry him back out,” she exhales rough as she drops her hand from his sight, spits out the burden of wasted time than wasted life. “He’s gone.”

Without an hour into this life, the thought of laying soldiers into the dirt punches him numb as the nurse stands up before he does, dusts off her shirt before he does. Suggests taking out the soldier to the back before he does.

The world inside his head spins when he stands up and grabs the soldier by his underarms this time, bites his tongue and the way his throat tightens up at the touch of open flesh to his fingertips, in an attempt to ease the nurse’s shoulders from dragging this grown, lifeless man. As he lifts the soldier up, the yellowed piece of paper drifts out and onto the floor, stirred and nearly stomped in the chaos of the clearing for another soldier coming in. He lowers himself even more to match the nurse’s level, enough to balance the soldier in one hand and sweep his other hand for the paper and shove it into his back pocket.

Seokmin thanks nameless anybody’s somewhere for another day of tallying up for an uncertain mark for the next, for the uncertain tomorrow. He thanks nameless somebodies somewhere for being able to bid himself another night, wedged between other nurses on the wooden slab of a bed. Sodam, the nurse he learned to love and the name he learned too late, offered some pity well enough to smother his skin in antibacterial and sew his cheek shut.

Sleepless eyes drift to his uniform hanging at the other side of the bunker, just as the last of the evening's nurses head out for their round. He pushes himself up between the neighboring shoulders and grabs his shoes from the end. Pulling out the slip of paper from his pants, he hurries over to the lantern, crouches by the wavering light and steals some of it for the paper. He unfolds it, flicks off lint and dirt.

 _Please not this life Seokmin_ _  
_ _Soonyoung_

He remembers Sodam grabbing the collar of his shirt on the first day, a faux memory of some sort, and it was the first time blood marked his shirt and the last time he ever cared about the pristine white of it. He remembers Sodam telling him, through gritted teeth, almost like a plea, “Never carry a body to the back alone.” It rang in his ears, clean slit of sweat down the back of his neck when she relaxed her grip and her voice held onto the semblance of what kind of person she might have been if they met somewhere other than here, “You’re important here, Hwesung.”

Returning back to the wooden slab, he trips his way to line his shoulders up with everyone else’s. Not even the digging his own shoulder's corner into the nurse’s collarbone startles anything from him. So he lifts a hand up to the sleeping nurses’s lips, centimeters of a stretch from realizing he could have moved onto a more spacious spot near the door, could have spent the night not knowing.

Seokmin could have listened to Sodam.

Seokmin should have listened to Sodam.

____

When Seokmin blinks the clouds out of his eyes, a stained glass of clouds and the greens, whites, and blues of the world drift below his bare feet. Where the colors don’t hit, the clouds remind him of the ones his eyes latch all over church paintings for a split second, not the ones of heaven but not exactly the ones of hell, either. A single-file line strokes out across the clouds until no amount of squinting can help him with discerning one head of a person from another.

But in a second, behind the single bat of his eyes, he sits across from a man in a black suit, black hair, black irises.

“Seokmin, right?” the voice behind the desk dives deep.

He swallows hard, voice rusting in his throat. He gives up answering and peers down to his hands, just how he remembered them. No blood that isn’t from his own body across his arms. No dirt caking under his fingernails. No scratches, no bandages. No smell of death lingering with every move he makes.

He lifts his hand up to his face, traces out where the ghosts of Sodam’s stitches should lay to rest, scars tracing his skin in a mistake of a dartboard. But instead, his fingertips trickle over smooth skin. When he runs the tip of his tongue across his teeth, no gaps stop the path, no metal meeting his taste buds.

And no Soonyoung, either.

“You went through this one longer than most people,” the man lauds at him, almost mocking him so. He’s not sure if he wants to thank the man for stopping that life so soon or beg for forgiveness to never vanish into second lives like that again. “I’m Jeon Wonwoo.”

The name chokes any more words out of his throat. It’s the name he completely forgot, and he thinks he should have known. 

“The first one is typically the hardest to pull through.” A pause, as if waiting for Seokmin to answer, he’s not sure why Jeon Wonwoo has to wait at all. “I like to test them in one go."

“Can I go back now?” his voice cracks at the last words, heart dropping like he just set off a curse in Soonyoung’s name.

When he looks up, the ebony desk between him and Jeon Wonwoo engraves out five names and something blurring at the end. “Pick one.”

_Jang Joonhyun (36)_

_Seo Seonghwan (43)_

_Ji Hwesung (39)_

_Choi Yoonwon (27)_

_(25)_

_Kim Chulgoo (25)_

His thoughts and any form of coherence abandons him. Between each name, his mind shuts down to the ripped note he salvaged. He watches _Ji Hwesung (39)_ fade into the smooth of the table, drops the count to four names.

_If not that life, Soonyoung, then which one?_

When he lifts his hand up, he doesn’t care where it lands, where this next life takes him. Anything is better than this first reincarnation.

_Life: -2_

When Seokmin catches his reflection, words zip into one ear, muffle into the cotton of his blankets, and fly out his other ear. At the bottom corner of his phone screen, his face spans narrower and his neck longer than what he’s used to, needing to tilt the camera higher to capture his entire face into the shot. His hair naturally spreads across his forehead from the shorter fringe when he runs his fingers through, and his jaw is a lot more boxy than he remembers. And the thought of having to shave so soon pokes into his mind for the first time at this hour, at the pricks dotting his chin and the growing ghost of a mustache under his nose.

Aside from the drastic change of his appearance from his previous life and the life he already knows, he notes the video call he’s currently in with another man. _Kitaek_ fading in white when he swipes his thumb up just to see how long he’s been talking to him.

_2:12:46_

_Chulgoo_ from his end of the call after muddling in the questioning of his whereabouts, why-abouts this time.

_2:12:47_

His scowl bleeds into his thoughts, _Two hours?_

_2:12:50_

_About what?_

_2:12:52_

He drags his eyes away to stop staring at the seconds, to throw him back into the conversation. The man, the supposed Kitaek, barrels on the possibility of working on the script together, since their ideas for a new movie seem to overlap, though his boss assured him they can work on the movie separately.

_2:15:36_

_2:15:36_ is the amount of time he needs to invite this stranger over to his apartment.

Kitaek asks if coming over can alleviate the weight of notebooks for this first draft of the script. “I’ve never been so invested in a movie in a long while” is his excuse for the rushed encounter, their first meeting coming sooner than they imagined.

He doesn’t ruminate in the risk involved; if he dies in this life, perhaps he’ll skip one step closer to finding Soonyoung into his next life. He reminds himself that this is the mindset that was once condoned during his university years, a thought process he scolded himself from ever succumbing into. But on the other hand, he reminds himself of how deep and raw people collapsed into the actualities of these reincarnations and what Jeon Wonwoo can do to anyone, which strings he knows to tug and control to do something that was once the definition of impossible.

In the troubling midst of contemplating if he made a mistake, he tosses the weight of it all, and that’s how he spends his first few minutes in this new identity.

He stands up, notices the ground settles slightly farther away from his eyes and how much of his legs lose themselves into muscles, the tight fit of his shirt. He scans around the room for something--a picture of the past, a wallet, a name other than the _Kitaek_ and _Chulgoo_ he just closed out of.

When Kitaek rings the doorbell, his eyes fall on the grocery bag of drinks and the label of meat bleeding through the plastic. He offers his first guest in this life coffee, juice, water, even a bottle of beer, anything his eyes glossed over when he opened his fridge for the first time this morning.

They skip past shaking hands and “How are you?” and leap right into the scribbles across legal pads and waiting for their laptops to whir at the dining table. They sit at opposite ends of the table, partly because they can’t salvage much information about each other and partly because they have more legal pads needed to be displayed before them than they can count with their fingers.

He points at one in permission to pick it up and read it. When Kitaek nods, eyes descending lower than the laptop screen once again, he reaches over and brings the first legal pad on the table. He flips open to the pages, skims into the opening scene, envisions what kind of movie they’re creating, but never put the characters together.

Two familiar names between the lines, Seokmin leafs through the page page, to _New apartment. Few pictures of SEOKMIN and SOONYOUNG_ , a second page, _SOONYOUNG_ , a third, _SEOKMIN_ , until crinkles of ink and weathered paper carry on the conversation for them.

“Is there a particular reason why you named your characters ‘Seokmin’ and ‘Soonyoung?’” he asks Kitaek, careful with every word that comes out.

“They were the first-” Kitaek begins but doesn’t finished, seems to be asking the question himself and unaware of where this sentence is supposed to end, really- “I don’t know. I just thought they would go well together.”

Silence sits between them, served on the table like it’s the only thing they can stomach right now. He wonders if this is _it_ , if the man sitting just a meter or two in front of him is Soonyoung. Then his voice finds itself, barely loud enough through Kitaek’s finepoint scrawling destinationless lines all over the page.

“Soonyoung?” hushed for calling out, desperate to hear his own name at his ears.

Kitaek finally chances his eyes up and over the edge of his laptop, straight into his eyes, and replies in the only way he needs to. “Seokmin?”

Tears rim at Kitaek’s eyes, above the tiny scar nearing the corner, and somehow, the bottom of his vision blurs, too, periphery of the world knocking the wind out his lungs with two syllables. He’s not sure who sobs out first, but everything hits him all at once, and his shoulders can’t bear the weight any longer.

His elbows dig into his thighs, head digging into his palms and chiding at himself for thinking about their last life of having to carry Soonyoung, of being the one to lay him to rest in a way he’d never want to see. The world rattles, eyes searching for something that isn’t moving, and he notices he breathes up a wall when arms slip around his shoulders and pull him close.

But when Kitaek kneels in front of him, rises higher onto his knees, a second cuts down to Soonyong’s arms around his chest and pulls him closer, squeezes him tighter, brings him lower. The pads of Chulgoo’s fingertips burn, refusing to let Kitaek go anywhere further, refusing to lose a hint of Soonyoung again. His apartment lulls in the choke for air, Kitaek’s shoulder soaking in the sobs.

His voice trembles, trips over the brink of thoughts and decipherable words, when he asks, “Is it really you, Soonyoung?” His lungs reach out for another lungful to get the next words through, swallows down the throbbing of his temples to ask “Are you really Soonyoung?”

He feels Kitaek nodding his head, the side of his face pressed to the gesture like a lifeline into this life and the escape route from their past life. “It’s me, Seokmin, it’s me” gives way for the sob wringing his throat dry and scathed, and he feels it against his chest. His voice runs desperate, chasing for an answer, and his lungs almost run out of breath, of a voice, at Soonyoung’s next words, “Did you find my note, Seokmin? In my pocket? There was a note there, but I don’t know if-I couldn’t-”

He curses at himself for letting his guard down, tension of his arms ebbing away that this really is Soonyoung he thought he lost, because it graces Soonyoung to slip out of his hold, slip his hands across his face, and for him to notice the red all over his eyes, wet smears all over his cheeks.

“I did” is a tough exhale of truth out his throat as he refuses to open his eyes. It aches his chest when he answers, and his throat burns at the thought of having to sneak a syllable out again. He reaches past the firm palms across his face to pull Soonyoung closer again, lets only the pleading, broken voice of “Stay here” to salvage between the two of them.

Evening guides them to the bed with Soonyoung’s arm hooked around his waist, sticking close to his side. Seokmin’s digging fingernails into his shirt, his arms gathers as much of Soonyoung as he can until the urge to cry depletes because of what he learned just hours ago. When he lies down, Soonyoung perches himself at his bedside, drops a kiss to his temple.

“Can you stay here for the night?” The grip on Soonyoung’s wrist begs more desperate than his words, louder than his own voice.

____

His head swears at him at the first crack of sunlight of the day. Through the heavy puffs around his vision, barely enough to keep his eyes open, the figure before him faces its back towards him, snoring as if everything of last night was a dream, that his eyes are leftovers of a nightmare. If he remembers correctly, this is Soonyoung. This is Kwon Soonyoung, even if his narrow shoulders aren’t noticeable in the Soonyoung he knows. Even if the rumbles of sleep echo louder than what he remembers from before. This is Kwon Soonyoung, and he didn’t lose him from their last life.

He shifts himself closer to Soonyoung’s side of the bed and his arm sinks heavy as he slips his arm around his waist, flits pecks at the back of his neck and where his shirt dips down. It’s Seokmin’s shirt--or Chulgoo’s, he should say--across Kitaek’s back. Oversized, like what Soonyoung teases him about since their visions could breach over kitchen counters, and gives too much leeway for close touches, just like in their first lives.

Everything encased under the perimeters of the bed reaches too far for his vision to clear up to, and it takes the dark stains on Soonyoung’s shirt to pick up the cause of it. In a second, fools him into an instinct, he holds Soonyoung closer against him.

A sharp gasp frees itself over the pillows, and Kitaek’s muscles shock taut against him. Numb from last night, he doesn’t ponder into first judgements when he slips his hand under the shirt, lays a palm over Kitaek’s stomach, and fans his digits out to soothe the shocked muscles there. Under his arms, Soonyoung fights off the tremble of his entire body, and it all gives way to slip his hand higher and flatten his palm right over Kitaek’s heart.

Soonyoung places a hand over his own, over the shirt, grip tight around his fingers. But he keeps themselves this way, long after Kitaek’s nails imprint dents onto his skin, until Soonyoung’s breathing slows down.

When Soonyoung flips over on the bed, he marks up the tears on Kitaek’s face with his fingertips.

“It’s over now,” Soonyoung whispers, and he revels in their foreheads gravitating towards each other until all his eyes spell out is Soonyoung, Soonyoung, Soonyoung.

 _Kitaek, Kitaek, Kitaek_ and the anonymity of the soldier Soonyoung borrowed his life from, hammers into his mind. “It still hurts.”

Breakfast looms silent between them like a burden, not even when their reason for getting up arises from Seokmin’s stomach growling as they counted heartbeats to stop that second wave of a sob, not when they giggled at that sound. Soonyoung rounds his way to the kitchen to begin making breakfast, to familiarize himself with Chulgoo’s kitchen.

And even the simplest of meals brims the smile on Seokmin’s face, too much that it falters.

He loves it; he _wants_ to eat what Soonyoung made for him.

Their past life gnaws at him, though, and he wonders if Soonyoung knew what kind of life they would throw themselves into after their first. Kitaek settles at the opposite end of the dining table and doesn’t wait until his thighs touch the chair to scoop a spoonful into his mouth. At his end, the guilt of a glutton lives on for living through that first life and to see Soonyoung again so soon, to eat breakfast with him like this.

With his food remained untouched, he blinks his eyes open hard to watch Soonyoung pick up his bowl and move over to his side of the table, his cup and spoon meeting with Seokmin’s cup and spoon at the corner of wood. A hand drapes onto his leg, steady over his nitpicking fingers. Soonyoung separates his left fingertips from his right to slide the spoon into his hand, to wrap his hand around the handle.

“I’m right here, Seokmin,” Soonyoung whispers.

He dives into the sound, into the words. He nods and finally takes the first bite.

____

The calendar proffers days for Seokmin’s mind to finally surrender into the fact that Soonyoung is here with him, that Soonyoung is okay. The past few days consist of two-hour gaps between hello and goodbye so Soonyoung can pick up more clothes from his own apartment at the other side of the city. And when he returns, sometimes beating the traffic-hour along the way, the bag of clothes in his hand is always accompanied by a bag of groceries.

There must have been more of those days than the occasions when he finally picks up the chopping board and knife, offers to cook for Soonyoung’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner. He knows he can’t pay it all back to Soonyoung for somehow pulling him out of bed all those days just to ensure his stomach fills with more than just air. The guilt for refusing to crawl out of bed sometimes traps itself up today, though, when he thinks about cooking for him with a mindful palate.

“Even though I know you’re Seokmin,” Soonyoung perches himself at the counter after giving into Seokmin cooking everything this time, swinging his feet in the air, “should I call you Chulgoo from now on?”

He concludes it suspicious if they called each other by the names they grew up to now outside of the apartment. As he voices this out, Soonyoung nods, mouths out that it makes sense. “So Seokmin at home and Chulgoo outside, then?”

Seokmin tests out _Kitaek_ at the tip of his tongue, grits the syllables he should fend accustomed to for the rest of this life. “Soonyoung at home and Kitaek outside, then,” he mirrors.

____

Another wordless day of writing kicks them off from the dining table and to the bedsheets, swiping off text messages from others curious about this new movie. Soonyoung’s crossed legs on the bed cradle his head this time. Kitaek’s entire face hovers upside down above him whenever he chances his eyes open.

Soonyoung runs a smoothed-out piece of jade over his forehead, whispers so gentle and unreal that he wants to reach out and touch his voice, “In my past life, I massaged people’s heads. Is that weird?”

Seokmin grins, lets his eyes flutter open to meet Soonyoung’s. The cool piece is lifted off his forehead, only to replace it by Soonyoung’s shirt skirting over his hair, Soonyoung’s lips over his. “If you asked me any time before now, I would have said so.”

He brings his hands up before Soonyoung moves too far away, to leave him one more kiss.

“Do you want to move in, Soonyoung?” he catches himself asking over the stars, over the moon, over the slit-spaces between him and Soonyoung.

It’s a thought escaped by mistake.

He locks it down over their Sunday afternoons of laundry and the basket waiting for Soonyoung’s clothes to be tossed in with Seokmin’s, their shared clothes they now forgot the true sole owners of. He shushes it into the pit of his apprehensions when Soonyoung pads from the kitchen and peeks his head through the crack of the door to summon him for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The visage creeps up on him, taps him on the shoulder for a “What about this time?” when Soonyoung tightropes above his conscience and sinks into it, head on Seokmin’s lap and the television rolling the entirety of a movie grasping onto their attentions by the rolling credits. It crawls out his throat when they meet again in the evening after a day of working, after the kiss hello upon the front door locking and the world forgotten from their sights.

And what doesn’t help is the fact that Soonyoung lingers in his apartment more than his own, in a life they can take over completely. He knew that it’ll be hard to stop himself from wanting to ask.

“I’d love to” ghosts onto his lips before Soonyoung’s own.

____

By the time they greet the moon again, Soonyoung ticks off the days before he has to hand over his apartment keycards. Seokmin offers to help move things out of his apartment, decide which things to give away, and it will be his first time visiting the place Kitaek calls home.

The extravagance of Kitaek’s apartment, though, makes him wonder why not here instead. But with Soonyoung recounting lonely nights in such a broad space, over marble floors refracting the moon synonymous to a horror’s story’s introduction, he gets it now.

The entire floor belongs to Kitaek. Two window walls that corner borderlines of kitchen and living room, the floor space alone spans five times bigger than Seokmin’s apartment. With luxuries of gold watches on display in the walk-in closet and “The real Kitaek had cognac diamonds in a donation box.” King-sized canopy bed with drapes piled up to the edges on the floor. A second quick sweep around the apartment, Seokmin’s feet pace out of place.

Their first day of packing his belongings into boxes closes up in Kitaek’s apartment, muscles sore that Seokmin doesn’t even want to drive them back to his apartment and sleep there. But they don’t mind. The bed will be the last thing they dismantle. Boxes lining up against window walls, almost to block out the city whole, Seokmin’s idea of auctioning off the items seem to be a reasonable one. That way, Kitaek’s riches will go somewhere that isn’t himself, to more than one place and one person in one time.

When the sky reflects indigo skylines and night lights, they retire with giddy embraces and miscalculated kisses, one aimed for his cheek but accepting many more along his jaw. Palms pressing his shoulders back for the sigh, digits running over the back of Soonyoung’s neck and reaching up to his thick hair. Goodnight kisses bloom bashful between them, blooms blushes up from their necks to their cheeks, but he misses it this way.

____

When the sun breaches through Kitaek’s home, Soonyoung is already sitting at the edge of the bed, running his thumb over Kitaek’s driver’s license brandishing the month and the day that matches with the month and the day of today. Counting up the months and years against Chulgoo’s own driver’s license, Soonyoung spends the entire time waking Seokmin up with a grin plastered on his face because “ _You’re_ older than _me_ in this life.”

But they shove aside their teasings that border serious promises of this life that they can't keep, Soonyoung’s “Spoil me” and Seokmin’s “I thought I do already.” They let their highs of their jokes drizzle down to the whir of the city outside of the two window walls. Soonyoung’s voice dims down as he admits that it feels kind of odd, kind of _wrong_ to celebrate someone else’s birthday. They have the life and body of one person’s life, but they still carry their own deep down inside.

So when Soonyoung asks, between the popping open the hot containers they ordered for delivery across the floor and Seokmin wiping the broth that splats on tiles with a towel, he doesn’t hesitate complying with Soonyoung’s plans, that they will not do anything special for Kitaek’s birthday.

“Can we do the same for Chulgoo’s, too?” Seokmin asks.

“Of course,” steadies not even a beat after.

____

Once they moved everything of Kitaek’s belongings that Soonyoung has even a mere inclination to keep, they decide today, with the boxes still taped and walling up the corner of Chulgoo's living room, that they will actually _try_ to write. They haven’t picked up a productive pen since the first time they met each other for the third time. He’s not sure where this is going to go, but they let the thought travel south of productivity. Soonyoung takes up the chair beside him at the dining table, his arm weaving its way to the legal pad, bents of their arms touching on the table.

“This movie sounds so sad,” Soonyoung whispers, leaning his cheek against his arm.

“I know,” he tries, “but it’s what Chulgoo and Kitaek left behind.”

“How about-” Soonyoung pops the cigarette back into his lips after offering him the end, steals the pencil off his hand and continues the next sentence in the middle of one- “ _SOONYOUNG hugs him by the waist and starts singing along to the song._ ”

“Do you smoke in our real life?” Seokmin asks, another piece he wants to learn about the Soonyoung he missed out on. Irony squeezes its way through his lips, though, when he adds on, “As a physical therapist.”

He shakes his head, burrowing warmth onto the side of his arm, printing the shape of his smile onto the sleeve of his sweatshirt there. “I wanted to try it, but I was scared. Kitaek had this last cigarette left in his pack, so I couldn’t help but light it.”

“How is it?” Seokmin grabs another pencil from the cup.

“I don’t like it,” Seokmin gawks at the way he still brings the cigarette to his lips another time, “but it’s nice to experience things safely, you-oh, how about this as a voice-over?”

_NARRATOR (V.O.)_

_They thought they could beat fate._

“And gamble with time,” Seokmin whispers.

_NARRATOR (V.O.)_

_They thought they could beat fate_

_and gamble with time._

His smile drops when Soonyoung prods out something he didn’t consider at this point, “Do they?”

He feels his chest tighten at the single question. His hand squeezes merciless around the pencil in his hand until wood and granite dissolving in his hands follow a _snap_. The legal pad is the first to go into clarity, then it’s Soonyoung’s arm at his side, until his pencil and the entire table in front of him swamps up into the blur. The sob fights its way to escape when Soonyoung pulls him close. 

The resolution of the movie can be whatever they want to write on this draft but somehow, having these two don their names, having these two people in this fictitious world they control as Seokmin and Soonyoung, free-falls this idea into doubt, into the uncertainty of their own end when they run out of lives left to live.

When he turns to Soonyoung, plucking the cigarette off his lips comes too easily, no hindrance when he brings it to his own lips, steals a drag as Soonyoung flits a trail of kisses along his jaw, down his neck. Inhale the smoke, puff out a cloud above the two of them, he litters the air in smoke and a sob. Halfway between his hand on the table and his lips, he gathers as much of Soonyoung as the world allows, crushing the cigarette in his fist.

And his mind doesn’t brush a thought about the burn. He doesn’t care that his hand screams to forgive himself this time. He doesn’t care because it doesn’t hurt as much as the looming chance that they might not salvage anything like this in their next life.

Their productive day doesn’t last long into the clock. In bed, skimping out of dinner for a couple more hours, he whispers the dread out of, “I really wish this was our life over and over again.”

“It can be,” Soonyoung stops him. “Let’s just make the best out of this one.”

The sheets beside him rises when Soonyoung rolls over on the bed, rolls over him, and cups his face in his hands. Slotted between his legs, he feels a fingertip tracing contours. He closes his eyes, takes a deep inhale in. A kiss at the corner of his lips, at his cheek, along his jaw.

He doesn’t deserve someone like Soonyoung.

____

They should be happy when the producer barricades their phones with messages about going ahead with the movie, the compliments and suggestions for bringing the written page to the screen. But they decline being present for auditions and actually casting, for editing the movie and possibly the script. Seokmin admits he would rather continue their lives writing movies, living their lives with the names they weren’t born with but somehow destined to have. He sighs out in relief when Soonyoung reads the message, “Me, too” in the midst of his explanation for his desire to be absent in something they both created.

And when the movie hits post-production, they still decline attending the screenings, especially on the first day. They still decline attending screenings, even when theaters are packed to the brim with no leftover tickets to sell for the next two months, because they don’t need to watch it.

____

“Chulgoo,” his manager huffs through the phone, as if it costs a kilometer just to say his name, “your movie-the one you wrote for this year. It’s nominated for an award.”

He frowns, and perhaps the other line sifts out the “Kitaek wrote it, too” from the audible.

At the couch, with scripts and past versions aligned on the coffee table, he breaks the news to Soonyoung about the nomination. All Soonyoung offers him is a depleting scoff of disbelief.

“Isn’t it sad how we’re writing about our lives?” Seokmin lets a sound pass, half-gasp for air followed by half a laugh, half the heart and half believing in the truth before them. They present their misery in a mask even when they hide it to the world.

Soonyoung finally looks up from the table, and something passes over his face. One second, it’s Soonyoung capturing all the stars in his eyes but the next, his eyes sharpen and they want to cut right through the bullshit. Accentuated under-eyes and gray at the gloss across his own. It’s a pathetic magic trick they have to showcase half the performance whenever they step outside.

“Isn’t it sad they choose not to know about it?”

____

They stick in for the award shows because Soonyoung admits he wants to spectate how Seokmin acts with the allure of makeup and high-end suits, especially since he claims the only Seokmin he's ever familiar with is the one that "wears shorts and shirts and only puts sunscreen on." The same desire deflects back to Soonyoung. Their first day in the hair salon as brightly-lit and celebrity-packed as this one has Seokmin stopping himself from calling out to him, spilling relentless words of how the real Soonyoung would look in that hairstyle and serenity seizing his features when he closes his eyes from the hairspray.

The actual ceremony, the speeches of gratitude after the host hands them the golden plaque engraved with their names, don’t fare any better, either. With the director slipping into the front passenger’s seat of the van, they have no choice but to drop their hands, stop the links and careful runs of thumbs in reassurance, congratulations, soft “I can’t believe we did this.” Seokmin mentally tells himself to look forward when he troubles out his thank you speech on live, national television, tells himself to find the right camera when it’s Soonyoung’s turn to admire the plaque in his hand and list off the people who made this possible off the top of his head.

But when the ceremony comes to a close and the glowing hints of the after-party overtake the evening, it’s award-season mustk between them or the rest of the cast and crew who came along too drunk to care where Chulgoo and Kitaek trail off to. The moon casts another reminder that Kitaek is here with him when he presses Soonyoung against the wall at their front door, jaws drawing into the seams of his palms when he steals a gentle kiss and one more breath. The stars stolen from the skies for bolder shade at his eyes, Seokmin thinks it can be the makeup he’s never seen on him and imagining the same strokes of color on the Soonyoung in their real life.

Seokmin pulls back, only to send another kiss at the corner of his lips, challenges the silence when they tread along his jaw, presses a little harder under his ear, down his neck for the gasp wisping by his ear.

The next minute consumes him in a blur of flitting kisses and red marks where his lips wander off to on Soonyoung’s bare skin, half-lidded gazes meeting over the mattress with the leftover moonlight generous between the curtains. But all in the while, urgency trickles down to his fingertips in the way Soonyoung pulls him down by the loosened tie around his neck, tosses the tie off to the side completely when he coaxes their lips back together. Hot hands skate down from his shoulders and to the dress shirt unbuttoned by the first two during their ride back home.

Then the next two, and Seokmin swears he hears Soonyoung’s breath hitch.

“Seokmin,” his breath wavers, “if you ever want to stop, don’t hesitate to tell me.”

And the next two, but Seokmin thinks it’s his own this time. “Tell me, too, okay?”

____

When Seokmin makes up, it’s a dream in a dream, he thinks, eyelashes dipping into reality but surfacing back up. Touches feathering across his bare chest, five touches all at once now across the left side of his chest. Five touches molding into one, warmth breaching through the heartbeats, and a sharp breath pierces him back to where he is.

When he opens his eyes, Kitaek’s eyes trace each movement of his hand on his chest, yet his eyes yearn for something far in front of him. A deep breath from him, one from Kitaek, then they share the air between them, run their exhales in all the same steps.

Soonyoung lifts a kiss to the corner of his lips. Taking his hand off his chest to slot their digits together, Seokmin kisses the back of his hand once, twice, three times.

____

“How was this life, Seokmin?”

It must be the most gentle he has ever heard of Jeon Wonwoo since he was slapped in the face with six different lives. His voice doesn’t live off of cold edges and repelling off what he wants to hear, what he needs to hear.

At the question, the sense of security despite the uncertainty of living this life out until the end comes to mind, and so does the wish of wanting to live out another just like this one with Soonyoung. “I-I loved it,” he whispers just as he lets the tear drop onto his lap. “It wasn’t truly _us_ , but we didn’t care.”

Wonwoo nods at his words, and he believes in the flash of regret sewn in Jeon Wonwoo’s voice when he instructs him to “Pick your next life.”

“Can I ask which one Soonyoung picked?” pulls through from his lips so ceaselessly, the only thing he spoke to Jeon Wonwoo without his voice crumbling to a bare whimper, without clamping his lips back shut in hopes of a forgotten thought.

But Jeon Wonwoo shakes his head, confesses that Soonyoung can’t pick one just yet. “Even if he can pick one right now, I can’t tell you which life Soonyoung picked. I can’t tell him which life you picked, either.”

His eyes drop to the four lives remaining on the table. A thought hits him just then. “If he can’t pick another life yet, does that mean he’s still alive there?”

A sigh passes through when Jeon Wonwoo’s eyes drop to his clasped hands on the table, drop to somewhere beside him, and nods.

_Life: -3_

The city abandons him.

Each night surrenders to empty streets and fireflies of lampposts, drunken punches of reality, and the slide of his balcony door shut behind him. Wallet cracked open half a step before the door's ledge, he abandons the leather and plastic slips, business cards and the _Choi Yoonwon_ on his license that tells him he’s twenty-seven in the handful of minutes he’s known himself and resembles nothing like the Lee Seokmin he knew for twenty-five years. Scrap paper and company I.D. card tucked into where a photo of a parent, sibling, or significant other should be, flapping against the night breeze, scrawls of his work schedule greets him instead of a face, a memory.

It’s a regular stapled-behind-the-desk job that sounds nothing as interesting or bearable at the minimum to the one he has back at home. Perhaps it’s the reason why he plucks his own eyeglasses off and rubs the dirt off with his shirt, squinting onto the fabric just to ensure he gets every speck and dot off. Before he puts it back on, he examines it. Circular and wire rimmed, cold to the metallic touch when he slides it back on.

“No one else is awake at this time,” a voice rouses up somewhere nearby, jolts his heart more awake than he has been this entire day, and it’s _only_ three in the morning. Seokmin’s eyes dart around for the whereabouts of the voice, that it’s not the hours stringing up to the moon and heavy eyes hitting him from a different direction, a fresh bruise somewhere he wasn’t prepared to fight against. It’s not the droning hours he supposedly locked himself into by company contract, blaring shift’s end of midnight that should have ended long before that.

The balcony to his left keeps the voice from grabbing onto hallucinations, mocking teases of company by the wind. The man on the balcony next door hunches over the railing, elbows digging into the dire need of dusting off old paint jobs for new ones. Gentle cat eyes above the sleepy rings under his eyes, above the “What are you doing up?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” sacrifices into the breeze between them and from the lack of response from the man, perhaps the wind captures his voice and carries it away into the city. “Insomnia,” he attempts once more. Maybe the wind never picked it up in the first place. “What are _you_ doing up this late?” he flings the question back to the stranger.

“Just got home from work,” the man supplies with a mere shrug, as if the rest of the world ran the same schedule of retiring the day away at three-in-the-morning.

At least he’s not the only one.

“What kind of-” Seokmin tests the question out, but it’s not the wind that carries his voice away this time.

“Security.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not bad, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The man glances at him from the corner of his eye, discernible in the dark if it weren’t for the lights spilling from Seokmin’s door behind him. He inhales the city, exhales out the blues. “The hours are just weird.”

Seokmin grins away from the man’s sight at the word.

 _Weird_ , he thinks to himself. _This is weird._

____

“No one else is awake at this time.”

Work graced him with shutting down his computer earlier than the hours marked on his wallet this time, and he’s surprised to catch the man at one. Between the cigarette perched at the man’s lips and Seokmin’s courtesy of bearing out the smokescreen, he fans out gray wisps and nicotine walling up into the air. He tries not to cough, tries not to choke when he points out, “You said that last time.”

“Am I wrong?”

He swears he sees the man smiling at him for the first time. The city glints at his eyes, leftover sparks from late-night souls trapped in the look towards his direction. The smile solidifies against his doubts when Seokmin shakes his head. And just like that, the smile disappears among the stars. Not bright, like the ones guarding them tonight from above. More like the void spaces between one star and the next, leftover glows haloing around them.

Between the cigarette now dwindling between his fingertips, he wonders if this man can be Soonyoung if he just waits it out. If Soonyoung waited it out in their past life, then Seokmin must, at some point in these vicious cycles of life, have to wait it out for Soonyoung, too.

The lessons from high school and university ring into his ears, and he just hopes that in this life, Jeon Wonwoo will listen to him.

____

His chest tightens up and through the gasps for air, the front door holds back the knocks, urgency in the _bambambambam_ that can’t breach into any other apartment besides his own at this hour. When he peels his eyes open, vision clinging onto the ceiling and not the loss of something he can’t quite remember, he silences himself to know that the _bambambambam_ isn't stalking him out from his dreams. He wipes the sweat off his face, patting his chest more than the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his forehead, before hurrying to the front door, creaking it open bit by bit, to the neighbor from the balcony next door.

“I heard you crying.” The man scans all over his face for something. “Are you okay?”

Seokmin nods and when he does, a scream almost escapes at the soft rope teasing around his ankles. When he looks down, he blinks the shadows of the hour hard enough to find a kitten gracing around his feet, gray and yellow against the night and hallway lights. The man swoops down, picks the kitten up into his palm, and perches the endearing ball of quiet meows up to his chest.

“Sorry, I left my door open.”

Seokmin lifts a hand up just a paw’s reach away from the kitten. “The kitten is yours?”

“She was wandering around this one building I was assigned to for a few days.” The man curls the corner of his lips up, and Seokmin thinks about printing this into his mind before it disappears in a flash like the last time. “Those shifts weren’t too bad as long as she was around.”

When the man scrapes his eyes over his face again, over the waning, squeaky _meow_ into a purring yawn, his mind brandishes the hope that he will be Soonyoung, that he’s Soonyoung prying him out of a nightmare.

____

“No one else is awake at this time.”

The phrase buries itself into a routine between them, and so does the wish that the man in the balcony next door will suddenly meet reality and his dreams with an “It’s me, Seokmin” or a “Did you have to wait long?”

The nights tick on with this neighbor and he thinks whatever he has seems a little odd. Neither of them treading too far with opening up to anything digging deeper than superficial. Everything dies down to the whole city stilling alone and waning and all they have to say, really, is how late it is, how they should probably be tucked away in the blankets at this hour and the one before it, and nothing more. At the same time, whatever semblance of acquaintances he has with this man is hard to find and hard to leave.

____

The first time he brings up that one night is in the shameful form of “Thank you for checking up on me.”

The man shrugs, and his ears pick up on the purr hidden from his view. The man crosses his arms over the balcony’s railing, no hint of the cigarette matchbox in sight. A quip of a nod and nothing else, Seokmin thinks he’s starting to get used to this wordless presence of each other.

  
  


It’s a punch to the face when they retire for the night, and Seokmin tries to recall his thoughts about Soonyoung, only to realize there are none.

____

The name “Jisoo” melts from his lips the same way his lips melt into him: tentative the first time but after the first sound, after their first brush of lips, he does it again. And again. And again.

Fingertips escaping under the hem of his shirt, a solid palm flattens onto the small of his back, turns him over on the bed, and the touch is all gone when Jisoo lays him out across the sheets. Those same fingertips perch at his chin, tilt his head up a slight, and the world urges time to speed up, to spite him when their lips part. And Seokmin leans forward and up just to prop himself onto his elbows, just to slow time down against the trail Jisoo leaves across his jaw. Traces of Jisoo’s smile lingers onto his lips when Jisoo pulls away and lowers Seokmin back down over the mattress, only to pull Jisoo down by the back of his neck, thumb teasing under his ear, and to kiss him again.

And again.

And again.

When Jisoo falls asleep on his bed, his kitten at their tangled feet after remembering they left her alone next door, he wonders how kisses can taste so bitter. He wonders why Soonyoung’s kisses never tasted like this, why Jisoo’s eyes never flicker when he tells him his name is Seokmin.

____

When Seokmin orients himself across Wonwoo’s desk once more, something surges in him to grab the merciless god and throw a punch right there and then, not even care that the one rule that rang in every lesson about these reincarnations. That no matter how much anger seethes inside of him and manifests against Jeon Wonwoo, the merciless god will understand, and Seokmin hates that. But when he does, the urge to swing at him doesn’t crawl its way back up to the worse parts of himself. He merely grabs him by the collar, gets the man pulled up from his seat at the other side of the desk with the demand of why he couldn’t find Soonyoung in this life, “What did you do to him?” faltering the same way his fingers weaken.

A simple, languid raise of his eyebrows, as if he thinks Seokmin should have known. The nonchalance of this god digs Seokmin’s nails into the fabric there and if he just moves his hands up a few centimeters-

He drops his hands from the suit and when they fall onto the table, lines digging into his fingerprints flatten out for a smooth surface. When he looks down to the dark wood, he watches a line disappear, eyes gathering as much of _Choi Yoonwon (27)_ he can get before all he has left are _Jang Joonhyun (36), Seo Seonghwan (43), (25)_.

“I never said you’ll see each other in each life,” Wonwoo whims out, voice so even and low that he wonders how each of those words can finish off in peace. “You and Soonyoung just have to pick the right one at the right time to see each other."

_Life: -4_

When Seokmin catches his reflection, it’s not exactly himself that his eyes fall upon. The only part that is familiar to him is the toothy smile over the pillow beside him, even if it’s not exactly the way he remembers it, the button nose he leans into and grazes with his own, sharp eyes softening to the touch. Seokmin treads his palms across Soonyoung’s cheeks, testing out each centimeter closer just in case he falls away and disappears from the slits of his fingers. When he brings his face closer, until their heads are flush against each other and their breaths escape in quiet chuckles of what he thinks is disbelief, he thinks whatever pulled Jeon Wonwoo’s heartstrings must have cost them something and maybe everything, but Seokmin doesn’t care about that right now.

His eyes drift down to Soonyoung’s lips, lingers on the rest of his skin down his neck, trails down to his collarbones, at the purple marks on his chest and neck. The moment of silence breaks when he realizes that the cloth brushing up his own chest isn’t a shirt but the same blankets they’re both fighting to hide themselves under. But by the calendar behind Soonyoung’s side of the bed, the lack of clothes might be from the summertime brimming in through the crack of the window, the curtains ghosting in.

He traces the smile on Soonyoung’s face with his own--a kiss to his forehead, on that button nose, his left cheek, kisses the sound of Soonyoung’s giggles through it all, his right cheek, down his neck, adding on a couple more reds along the way.

A hand on the side of his neck, paints strokes of warmth under his ear and a blush at the buds of Soonyoung’s cheeks, to something he can’t see at this angle. The sparks glittering across Soonyoung’s eyes that strike him with a curse of that abandoned city when he whispers, “Did I do this?”

They challenge the bedroom laid too perfectly for them to believe it to be true. He pulls Soonyoung closer to him for their search under these four walls, even towards the ceiling, with the blankets hiked almost up to their shoulders. His eyes dart around the room for a sign in here. For pictures hanging around, for papers ruffling to coax more information about this life.

But at the end of their search, the shared, quiet gasp between them at discovering nothing new about this life stifles at the click of the door open.

Seokmin’s first instinct at the other side of the door is someone ready to kick them out of this reverie.

But then the sound bears with them a second and third time until it barrels into an seemingly endless string of a single word, high-pitched voices and light, fast steps punctuating every syllable in “Daddy.” His eyes search for Soonyoung’s, just as lost as he is, searching for an explanation of the voices they hear, to whom they’re calling out for exactly. Soonyoung’s eyebrows burrow into the question of _Are they calling out for you?_ that he answers with parted lips and the same question back.

Two _of them_ , Seokmin grounds himself back to this kind of their reality when the door opens all the way.

The matching pajamas he and Soonyoung wear under the blankets come into view when the two kids, a boy and a girl, jump onto the mattress and crawl under the blankets. On their journey up to the other end of the bed, he can’t help but note how the kids don’t flinch on their ways up, not when their heads finally poke from under the blanket when he and Soonyoung shift over to make space between them.

The tear falls before his mind processes he’s crying. He wants to stop it, tries to stop it, but another surrenders the bottoms of his vision when his eyes drift over to the little girl pouting when her eyes lock on him from below, not that far above the ends of blankets. Her tangled hair brushing under his jaw, he hesitates to lift a hand up to her back, pat the space between her shoulders. She melts into the shape of his chest, small under his hand and a comforting warmth when the side of her face meets his shoulder, and Seokmin doesn’t know what to do when nothing stops the tears.

The boy behind her wracks out a sob into Soonyoung’s chest, and he watches Soonyoung hug the boy, too natural to not have happened before, as if they’ve been in this life longer than their own. The little boy hiccups, smothering his face deeper into Soonyoung’s hold and drowning in the “Why is Daddy crying?”

A few seconds pass, soothing shushes Soonyoung lilts over the four of them, when he answers, “He had a bad dream,” a kiss to the boy’s forehead, “so he’s really happy to see both of you.”

Soonyoung’s hair pressing up into an invisible wall from sleep, gentle sunlight that doesn’t hurt his eyes too much, he takes everything in, in the four walls he wouldn’t mind calling his world.

When they send the kids for their afternoon nap, lays the two of them out in their own bed because they have yet to learn more about this world, they rummage throughout the house. The footsteps hanging above their heads hint that they live in an apartment and when he parts open the blinds overlooking the world from the kitchen, none of the street signs ever touched their palates before, and neither has the alphabet they’re written in.

“Are we not in Korea?” Soonyoung mutters from the kitchen counter behind him. When Seokmin looks back at him, a flush of envelopes splay out in his two hands. “California?” above the scowl, and there’s no other choice but to handle the card they’re dealt with.

____

With the kids gone to Soonyoung’s parents for the afternoon, after they admit they miss the kids and “Two days has been too long, Soonyoung,” they have their home to themselves. Time diffuses with rooting about what they can know about this life. Photo albums stacked under their nightstands and picture frames hanging up in the hallway. _Family_ pictures hanging up in the hallway.

Soonyoung pops open the file cabinet hiding in the closet of their bedroom, blending under the tailored pants hanging there. Thick stacks of papers labeled in anything too far into the timeline of adulthood and responsibility for him to worry about now. Envelopes crinkled at the corners, stack of its contents squaring off smaller than either of their palms.

But it’s the manila envelope that strikes the two of them from wanting to discover anymore, _Adoption Forms_ seizing the two of them unmoving.

“Soonyoung,” Seokmin whispers, and he hates the way his voice, the single exhale of the name trembles. He looks up to him but avoids his eyes, traces out anything that isn’t meeting his look in the middle. Rawon comes to his mind when he blinks back the tears, how ready Soonyoung must be for this life than he is, how uncertain he is for this life. “I’m scared to be a parent,” hangs out hollow at the edges of his lips.

Soonyoung sets the folder aside and touches the tears from his eyes. “We’ll take it a little at a time, Seokmin.”

From the papers, Soonyoung points a finger at him, grins around a “Jang Joonhyun.” He flicks his finger back to himself. “Park Hongmin.”

“How do you know?”

Soonyoung raises one of the papers and out trickles a smaller envelope barely stretching into the length of his palm. He lays out the envelope’s contents onto his palm and in a second, small squares line up across his hands.

“Our names are on the back of these passport pictures,” Soonyoung mutters through a pout. But instead of picking up one of him or Seokmin, he picks one up each of Hayoung and Younghyun, zoomed-up to accommodate their smaller statures.

Seokmin clears his throat at the remnants of that one life. “So should we just call each other by our names in this life in and out of the house?”

Soonyoung shrugs, sliding the pictures back into the envelope. “It would confuse the kids if we didn’t.”

The stretch of his shirt tightens into a slant at the base of his neck. When he opens his eyes and looks down, not even two hours after he and Soonyoung kissed both of them goodnight, Hayoung buries herself close against him. Palm smoothing down her hair, he asks if she can’t sleep, if something mean woke her up. He shoves the chuckle back down his throat when she says something about Younghyun kicking her in his sleep. Despite that, though, he stretches his arms out and waits for her to crawl onto him before he presses a solid hand across her back and sits up, settles her up into the crook of his elbow.

One glance at Soonyoung and Younghyun still sprawled and knocked out on the bed together, with her cheek nestling at his neck and slow breaths under his ear, he takes the two of them in front of the window of the kitchen, parting curtains aside to peek at the moon. He shuts them back up the moment she shifts herself closer to him, arms wrapping tighter around his shoulders.

Drumming fingertips across his back, he sways side-to-side in front of the couch, besides the television, around the coffee table, and brings them close to the kitchen counters but never treading the borders of granite. The hum from his lips rises out faint, barely unheard in his own thoughts about even considering singing, until his lips start to form the lyrics and Hayoung relaxes under his arms. Halfway through the first verse, the words overlap the ones from what feels like too long ago, to the song about the smallest star in the galaxy finding its way around.

____

Kindergarten rolls into the corner sooner than he hoped for.

Birthdays filled with tallying off their heights at the bedroom door. Heading out to the mall to pick out backpacks more than half their size clinging onto their backs in the style each of them likes. The second bedroom in the entire apartment emptied out to fit in a bunk bed and two desks for both of them. He and Soonyoung sitting on the bottom bunk to help them sharpen their pencils and review the alphabet at the last minute. A thin notebook settles into a home under the cup of pens at the kitchen counter, brimming with recipes he and Soonyoung can both follow through for lunches they can cook the kids for their lunchboxes, for him and Soonyoung before they head off to work.

He thinks this is a life he will never deserve.

The ways of loving Hayoung and Younghyun are what he yearns to learn day by day. 

So when Soonyoung suggests taking a picture of them before they drop them off to kindergarten, Seokmin can’t stop the tears stinging at his eyes, can’t stop Soonyoung from offering to drop them off alone if it’s too much for his heart to accept and hold onto.

“But I want to be there,” Seokmin whimpers over the tremble of his lower lip, under Soonyoung thumbing each of the tears away.

____

Seokmin blames it on puberty when the music booms from the kids’ bedroom. They do eventually lower the volume of their music, of their singing voices when Soonyoung asks them to, stricter than what he’s used to. When he calls his parents about it, he hears it the same, blushes flustered when his mother reminds him, “You were the same, too, Seokmin” among fragments of his father’s laughter in the background, melts right into Soonyoung’s own right beside him.

“Seokmin,” Soonyoung’s voice is monotonous, and he would be lying if he says he wasn’t scared of that tone. “This is the longest life we’ve been in so far.”

The kids long retired to sleep after complaining about their science teacher, and it’s moments like these that he misses hearing his name sung by Soonyoung’s voice. How long has it been since Soonyoung last called him Seokmin, not Joonhyun? How long did it take for Joonhyun to suddenly replace Seokmin from his identity? He never asked this before, but he thinks he probably never will.

“Are you scared, Seokmin?” his name echoing a second time coaxes out an answer.

When his mind reels back all the things he won’t have after this life, the first and only thing that comes to mind is Hayoung and Younghyun.

“I’m scared to lose them, Soonyoung,” Seokmin trembles out before his voice plunges deep and his voice tries to swim back up, break the surface of quietude and a sob.

Soonyoung’s eyes reflect into an ocean before him, waves wading in, tears spilling out, over and over again. But it’s not the brewing of a storm against jagged rocks. Soonyoung’s tears come in the lull of waves creeping onto the sand at their toes and retracting. Creeping in at the lowers of his eyes and retracting back down to the curve of his cheeks, suspending at his jaw before dropping. Creeping in at the lowers of his eyes and retracting back down-

“I’m scared to lose them, too,” he admits, and it’s the first time he hears Soonyoung sob, the first time he buries his face into his shoulder. He doesn’t hinder the way Soonyoung’s legs cave in sheer ounce by sheer ounce until they settle themselves on the floor.

He holds Soonyoung there, warns him one time and only that one instance that the kids might wake up, because he can’t stop himself from burying his face into Soonyoung’s chest, holding onto him tighter to muffle out the sob.

____

“Your sister and your dad are the exact same person,” Soonyoung points out behind him.

“Yeah,” Younghyun agrees, “it’s kind of scary.”

Sending the kids off to university only tests how much Seokmin can stop himself from crying, and he’s already failed and it’s _just_ Hayoung’s first acceptance letter. But it’s also Hayoung’s dream university to attend that driving back and forth from home and classes every weekday is one of the less practical reasons for accepting that admission there. He pulls Hayoung under his arms, peppers in slurring “I’m so proud of you” between the long sniffles to throw back his sobs, “but if you go, I’m going to miss you.”

Hayoung speaks in sobs against Seokmin’s shoulder, feels her shoulders shudder when she tightens her arms around his chest and her words barely die out with a cry. “Dad, I didn’t even say I’ll go there yet.”

“I know,” Seokmin exhales, lets his throat wring out the last of his cries to steady his voice, “I know, Hayoung, but it’s the one you want to go the most.”

He can't imagine what the Younghyun's first acceptance letter will bring for all of them, and the day they both decide where they want to brew their futures from.

____

“Dad, Younghyun got a boyfriend,” Hayoung announces the first thing when they accept their first phone call from them after their first quarter begins for the two of them. Day by day without the kids settle kind of lonesome when it's just the two of them around the apartment now. He thinks these video calls suffice for having an emptier home, and he's glad Hayoung and Younghyun still call in once in a while between their studies.

Seokmin and Soonyoung share a glance at each other at the news.

“Why are _you_ the one to tell us?” Soonyoung grins.

“What did you do to your brother?”

“He asked me to,” she beams, clapping her hands under her chin, “because he’s too shy to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because he thinks Dad will hunt the guy down if they break up.” Seokmin points a finger at Soonyoung beside him, and she nods her head.

____

“I hate this, Soonyoung,” Seokmin chokes against Soonyoung’s shoulder, under his arms, “I don’t know if I can stay here any longer.”

“Seokmin, we _just_ came in.”

The bridal shop is all white against their eyes when they wait behind Hayoung to confirm her appointment.

“Is your dad going to be alright?” the receptionist frowns behind the front desk.

Hayoung giggles behind the fan of her fingertips, but Younghyun is the one who answers her, “Hayoung will cry during her appointment, too, so it’s okay.” Hayoung brings her hand up into a fist, in a futile threat of rubbing her knuckles on her brother's jaw right then and there. Younghyun long lost the fear of it to even flinch at it anymore, merely stuffs his hands into his pockets and raises his eyebrows at him.

"Shut. Up. Younghyun." Hayoung's voice snaps the conversations across the front desk until it breaks into a fit of laughter, blends in with their son's despite the warning. “You’d be the same when it’s your turn with Aron.”

____

“What happens to Hayoung and Younghyun?” scratches his throat into a sob when he realizes where he is.

Hayoung and Younghyun, the two kids he would throw himself into another five of these lives for. Two kids he was afraid to love in the start. Two kids who he became afraid to lose in the end, just as much as Soonyoung.

Wonwoo folds his hands together, glances down to his hands there, but a word ceases to exist from him. The outlines of the man before him haze out, and the tears flare a fever down his cheeks and along his jaw, unending at the thought of not knowing where the two kids he can call his own will end up. He never learned about the possibility of loving the people he meets in these lives, if there are more people he’s being tested on finding in these reincarnations.

“Will Soonyoung and I have them in our next lives, Wonwoo?”

Seokmin grits his teeth, seethes out foreign from his own voice, the anger packed into two short, merciless syllables, “ _Wonwoo._ ”

_Life: -5_

When Seokmin catches his reflection, it’s against the side mirror of his car. His reflection unbuttons his trench coat and dusts off the snowflakes withering on the fabric. His hair swooped for the fringe to make way, it can’t conceal the streaks of gray disturbing the last of lingering youth he can salvage. Jaded faze at his eyes, crowlines at the corners without a bare lift of the corners of his lips, he settles for never trying to guess his age this time around. When he smiles, one of his lower teeth is replaced by silver and the sunlight clings onto it from the side mirror of his car.

A file crate digs its bends into his fingers and his hip, above the _Seo Seonghwan_ on the sticker there. _Formatting References_ tab at the front, _Critical Thinking Essays_ wedged in between _Conspiracy Theories_ piquing his interest on what kind of profession he has in this life, _To Grade_ stirring a cloud of a sigh from his lips, to the empty _To Pass Back_ weighing his shoulders heavy.

He must be a professor.

His home here lives in a gated community where he has to push a button, watch the security guard inside the gate nod at him, before he opens everything up. The entire apartment complex lives off Victorian, something his eyes never have the luxury of finding back in Seoul.

Perhaps he’s somewhere far from Seoul.

His mind must be playing with him as he slips his backpack on his shoulder, closes the trunk with a _bam_ that drowns the “Seokmin” in the air, out of his own mind, “Seokmin.” He glances to his side, only to hush out his sigh of disappointment when it’s a man reading a notecard, eyes too focused on the pink to spare a glance at the car slowing its way to the parking lot.

But it might be Soonyoung. It might be the Soonyoung he knows buried behind the notecard and the mirroring crowlines at his eyes and taut skin at the back of his hands. He lifts his crate onto the trunk of his car and hurries before the man steps beyond the gates, beyond his reach of chances.

His words zip by without a thought, brain processing a word here and there about finding someone and happening to be familiar with Lee Seokmin. And before he knows it, before the name hangs long in the wind before them, he sinks his face into the side of the man’s neck, pulls Soonyoung close against him.

He learns that Soonyoung carries around a notecard organizer, and he wishes every reincarnation is generous in that specific way. Hauling his crate back, they walk up the stairs to Soonyoung’s apartment while he flips through the notecards inside, fans out one in blue “for the people I know,” one in green for places. He lets a white one peek out from the tabs for his workplace and an orange one for around the house.

“What does pink mean?”

It might be the winter at their cheeks or conquering the flights of stairs instead of the elevator when Soonyoung shies out, “For the most important things.”

His smile clings onto those words, long after he asks if Soonyoung wants to sleep here for tonight, borrow some clothes, and pretend that this is the life they always had.

____

His heart punches at his lungs when he wakes up to a scream, scrambling under his arms, scratches at his hands. He isolates himself away from Soonyoung under the blanket and when he sits up, Soonyoung props himself by his elbows on the floor, eyes blown and unrecognizing to the person right in front of him.

“Soonyoung,” he calls out quietly, “it’s me, Seokmin.”

When the words click in his mind, Soonyoung stands up and reaches across the bed, greets him an apology and a kiss to his lips, tears at his shoulders when he sobs right then and there. Seokmin questions his reaction, drops it when he believes it’s just Soonyoung getting used to finding each other in this life.

His heart punches at his lungs a second time. After coming home from teaching and waking Soonyoung up from his nap, he forces the courage out of his doubts enough to ask Soonyoung why he wakes up shocked to see him on the same bed as him. Something strikes in Soonyoung, a crack rippling across his face when he asks so.

All Soonyoung does is pass him a pink card from his organizer.

_Amnesia. Can’t remember anything new._

_Most recent memory: Hayoung’s wedding, Younghyun crying for his sister_

____

Seokmin plans it all out in his head. For their mornings to not revolve around Soonyoung’s screams or adding more scratches on his arms, he needs to wake up before Soonyoung, never on the same bed as Soonyoung, never in the same room as Soonyoung. The screams soon became markers of how many times the neighbors called up on them, and he doesn’t want the burden of adding any more for Soonyoung or his neighbors.

It’ll be different, he thinks. But at least this way, Soonyoung won’t have to wake up in tears because of a stranger in his bed.

____

He conducts himself almost soundless in the living room after Soonyoung complains about his sore throat and he can’t remember why, can’t remember the medicine Seokmin left at his bedside. So when Soonyoung hobbles into the hallway for the bathroom, he stops halfway. Scratching his head, he turns to his direction, embarrassed when he asks, “Did you sleep here?”

Seokmin nods, and he thinks this might be the worst thing he can do to him. But it might help his throat heal, help him stop running into pieces of the past that lead up to the loss of half of his voice. “I did.”

“Why don’t I have a notecard of you?”

“I’m here to take care of you,” Seokmin treads out, “but I won’t be here for long, so I asked if I could skip the notecard.”

Soonyoung nods, soaking in the words. He clears out his throat. “What’s your name, at least?” beams hopeful, despite the strain walling up his throat and his voice, and Seokmin wants to gives up his plan.

“Seonghwan,” he half-lies.

A knock on the living room wall, Soonyoung pokes his head from the corner. “Seonghwan, do you want a drink?”

He tells himself to decline the offer at first, considering how awful he handles alcohol in his first life. But after picking out the weight around Soonyoung’s eyes and the deep exhales of exhaustion, he slaps a sticky note on the last paper he read and follows him out.

They settle at Soonyoung’s front steps, sealed glass bottles lining up on the porch banister refracting ocean blues and horizon oranges into green. Two shot glasses barricade the space from their legs brushing, and Soonyoung pours some into one and offers it to Seokmin.

“Did work go okay?”

“It went fine. Nothing happened.” Soonyoung shrugs, downs his own shot with his eyes locked to the sidewalk before sighing. “Sorry, I have nothing new from work.” Seokmin shakes his head, dismisses it all at once, because he would listen to Soonyoung say the same things over and over again if it eases some of his burdens, his troubles, his thoughts. “I might have told you this already, so you can stop me if it sounds familiar.”

Sunset paints all over Soonyoung’s skin when he downs another shot, before grabbing the entire bottle and draining out half in one swig. “I really-” his eyes scan around for the words somewhere in front of both of them, perhaps somewhere far away from either of them- “miss him.

“My family told me they tried finding him, just like all the versions I’ve seen of him, but they couldn’t find him. Or at least, that’s what I wrote before I cut ties with them. I hope he’s doing okay.”

Seokmin turns away before the older can pry out the tears in his eyes, the pinch of the glass nearly breaking under his fingertips.

 _I’m okay, Soonyoung_ , almost lures itself out his lips, out of his plans to help Soonyoung get better.

“But even if I saw him today, it’s not like I’ll know it tomorrow.” A heavy sigh, a pause, he’s not sure what either of them are looking for. “Maybe it _is_ better we couldn’t meet in this life.” _I’m right here._ “Or maybe we already did, but I don’t know it; I can’t remember it.” _You found me, Soonyoung_. “I don’t want Seokmin to hurt so much today because I won’t remember him tomorrow.

“Is it bad that I think about throwing away his notecard?” plunges his heart to the pit of his guts. “Or just writing that he _died_? It’s not because I don’t want to find him in this life. I love him and always will in this life, in my past lives, and all the other lives I have left to live, but I think it would save him a lot of pain if he doesn’t have to do the same things again and again and again because I can’t remember it."

He discovers the Soonyoung he knows when he chuckles. Orange sunset along his cheeks, the reflection of the ocean across his eyes, clinging onto his jaw, before Soonyoung wipes it right off. “Is it selfish of me to say that?” he asks with a mockery of a smile that lasts just as long as the silence between them.

The sound that escapes his throat courses a palm on his back, between his shoulder blades, running in slow circles. “You okay, Seonghwan?”

He doesn’t stop the tears as he slams the shot glass on the stairs and falls forward in his hands, blames himself for not composing himself this way, blames himself because _he_ wanted to live under a different name. “I’m fine” wears out with a hiccup, “it’s just so sad.”

“Have you ever been in love, Seonghwan?”

Seokmin chokes at the question, nods through the smears of his wrist over his eyes. “I have-I still am. I still love him.”

When he drags Soonyoung to bed that night, head lolling to the side and the alcohol surging every part of Soonyoung’s veins when he begs Seokmin to sleep with him tonight, he stays put and pries each one of Soonyoung’s digits off his sleeves, doesn’t consider killing the sobs back down his throat when he does. And before he goes to bed, he makes a note to call Soonyoung’s work tomorrow morning.

____

While parading off with a mask of what he shows the world and what the world actually throws at him, he wonders if it’s sad to create imaginary conversions with Soonyoung. Some days, he thinks about their mornings beginning not with a “What's your name?” but with a “Good morning, Seokmin” across the same room, on the same mattress, no trepidation for a morning kiss and reaching out for Soonyoung to bring closer to his chest. Other days, he simply wishes he can talk to Soonyoung about what happened the day before--what he cooked, what a student joked about yesterday that continued on today, the clouds forgiving this time around.

____

As Seokmin readies the table for a breakfast for two, an old song screeches creaky out of his mouth in this life compared to his first life. When Soonyoung comes in, calls out to him, he’s hopefully that he remembers something, that Soonyong remembers _him_. Tears in his eyes but a frown across Soonyoung’s when he confesses he just remembers the song from their first life, Seokmin offers a nod, accepting it all.

Soonyoung’s voice sinks solemn from the hallway. “You should live your life here, Seokmin. Pretend we never met.”

He can’t help but grind his teeth together at his words, anything to keep himself from saying too much. He shouldn’t blame Soonyoung for not remembering, but it’s a slap to his face to rethink of the meaning behind reuniting Soonyoung in this life, that their past lives building up to this one sound so close and almost synonymous to a mistake. “Easy for you to say.” Turning his back to him, he slides dishes into the sink, “since you’ll forget it by tomorrow, anyway.”

“I mean it, Seokmin.”

“I mean it, too, Soonyoung,” Seokmin spits over his shoulder, waits for Soonyoung’s steps to fade into the apartment before he scratches his tears off.

____

The next morning, guilt grips onto his throat. He should-no, he _has_ to apologize to Soonyoung, even when his own body can’t remember they even argued in the first place. As he makes breakfast, each dish exactly the same way as he prepared yesterday, he lets the world run on the humming of the song from his first life.

“Seokmin?”

With his back to Soonyoung this time from the counter, he clenches his jaws together to fight back the gasp. He nods, tear refracting all over the granite. He brushes it out with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, but it all comes out when arms slip around his waist, sink the side of his face between his shoulders.

It may be Soonyoung meeting him for the first time again. It may be the grip Soonyoung secures around his waist, his hands searching for his allover, and the tension wearing away when their palms do find each other. But if it means Soonyoung will be happy this way, when a day can mean an eternity to him, he thinks there’s no better reason for him to stay.

That night, when he recounts to Soonyoung of the argument from yesterday, blankets up to their shoulders, he thinks he might just cry at the gentle hold Soonyoung has on his face, too forgiving for the harsh words thrown at him about something he has no control over. His eyes sting when he closes them for the kisses at his shut eyes. When he apologizes, he would never expect Soonyoung to thank him.

“For what?”

“For letting me know,” he whispers, a fingertip tracing his lower lip, “even when I won’t remember it.”

____

Seokmin learns that mundane things can mean everything to them if they write them down. It’s the first time both of their days off coincide and after leafing through all of his notecards, after picking up on the familiar humming in the other room isn’t from a stranger. The song carries itself as he prepares breakfast for the two of them. Soonyoung settles himself at the dining table with a careful pen. The smile on his face pulls the tears back from hitting the pink notecard.

When Soonyoung finishes, in the midst of moving the steaming pot over to the dining table, his eyes strike hopeful, glimmering almost, when he asks Seokmin, voice so shy yet brims in excitement through the syllables, “Can I take a picture of you for your notecard?”

Flattening his back against the wall in their bedroom, soft droplets of kisses fall across Seokmin’s cheeks in the midst of Soonyoung holding the camera up to his eyes, constantly wiping his eyes behind the lens, behind the back of his trembling hands because “Were you really here this entire time, Seokmin?”

The map of their Sunday together begins at the print shop. At forty-three, brushing off snickers from Soonyoung at the stretch into their possible future selves, Seokmin feels as if the world threw him back at twenty-five. With his car stuck for repairs in the shop, travels in this Sunday morning runs on holding hands behind yellow lines of the metro and letting Soonyoung take the seat when the carriage becomes less comfortable with more shoulders bumping into each other. Soonyoung’s hand in his, his other hand hanging onto the handle, he doesn’t mind the wobble and other passengers pressing to his sides when Soonyoung smiles up at him as they near their stop.

The print shop thrives off a first-name basis with Soonyoung. The owner supposedly printed all of Soonyoung’s pictures; at least, that’s what his notecard dictates in big characters. Seokmin believes in it, especially when the owner asks if Soonyoung wrote some new notecards recently.

Reading all of Soonyoung’s favorites dotting the street, he learns that all the businesses in his deck of notecards thrive off that similar first-name basis with Soonyoung. Soonyoung’s favorite restaurant that reminds them of home has a few workers asking if Soonyoung is having his regular today, if this Seokmin is with him, since they usually serve Soonyong as he dines alone.

When they arrive home, once Soonyoung secures his picture at the corner of his pink notecard, he asks if Seokmin can sleep with him tonight because he wants to use up all the minutes he can.

“Before tomorrow” conceals his “before it’s all gone.”

But he resists, advises him to sleep, because he’s not going anywhere.

“I know,” Soonyoung admits. “I know. But I won’t know that when I wake up.”

Night hits them hard as he gives into Soonyoung. When Soonyoung kisses him, it shocks him different this time, and he can’t help but hold onto Soonyoung’s face and wish they can hold onto this moment longer than tonight. But it’s something he will never hold against Soonyoung.

When Soonyoung pulls back, he teases him, “Did I do that yesterday?”

He shakes his head, digging the side of his face into the pillow. “This is the first time you did that.”

A gentle kiss this time, Seokmin wants to beg aloud so daylight won’t break them apart just yet.

In the middle of the night, Seokmin stirs under his arms and slips out of his hold.

____

In the morning, Seokmin wakes up to an elbow nearing his face, a near nose-bleed if he never snapped his head back. With his chest to Soonyoung’s back, arms taut by anxiety and worries, of possible screams and hearts racing, he slips his hands away, inches himself farther from Soonyoung. It’s the first night since the week they met where he wakes up on the same bed with Soonyoung, and he curses at himself for forgetting.

A wobble of a notecard, he feels Soonyoung shift on the bed. And when he opens his eyes, Soonyoung picks up the white notecard Seokmin left on his side of the bed last night.

_The person next to you is Seokmin. He looks different from the one you met and he doesn’t look like Joonhyun, either. But it’s Seokmin in the inside._

_He’s on a pink notecard._

Seokmin’s breath stops at the click of the notecard organizer open. And when he hears it close back shut, he watches Soonyoung flip to his side of the bed. One quick scan up and down his face, Soonyoung inches himself closer until his arms slip around his waist, pressing the side of his face onto his chest, and Seokmin sinks into him.

As he clicks the stove off, about to call Soonyoung for dinner, he hears a sob come from the room. He hurries to their bedroom, kneels down to Soonyoung on the floor by the bed. He gathers as much of Soonyoung as he can, over the strewn notecards on the floor.

“We can put it back together, Soonyoung,” he assures him at the shell of his ear.

He feels Soonyoung fall limp under his arms, quiets his voice to ask, “How long have you been with me, Seokmin?”

“Since our first life,” without a beat to spare.

He shakes his head, wretches out a sob, and Seokmin reaches out to wipe the tears off. “In this life, Seokmin. How long have you been with me in this life?” But before he can count the months, remember exactly the day they found each other, Soonyoung’s voice drains out, “How long have you been doing the same thing every day, while it’s the first time for me?”

His jaw unhinges, and he doesn’t let his “Six months, Soonyoung” go unhindered between them. He brushes his hair off to the side before pulling Soonyoung closer to his chest. “We’ve been in this life for six months now, and I'll live the rest of this life with you.”

  
  
  


That night doesn’t spare any mercy for them, either.

He jolts him with fingernails into his arm and the nervous inhales from the chest under his arm. He pulls his arm away and crawls back far enough for Soonyoung to sit up and corner himself as far as he can into the edge of the bed as possible, as far away as he can get on the bed away from him. Dark air ticks by hard between them, and he brings a cautious hand up in front of him, whispers an anxious "Pink notecard, Soonyoung. I'm on a pink notecard."

But Soonyoung doesn't reach behind him for the organizer nor for the lamp. It's the hushed, exhausted "Seokmin?" that stops him from reaching over to switch the light on.

"Yeah, Soonyoung," he whispers. "I'm right here."

Soonyoung refuses to sleep. They can't pinpoint what stops him from sleeping but his "Can we not talk about it?" brings them to a quiet huddle at the porch of his apartment. A blanket draped over the two of them, the sides of their thighs surrendering no space even for the night air, he feels Soonyoung lean onto his shoulder, search for his hand all over his lap.

When he finds his hand, Soonyoung laces their fingers together. Suddenly, Soonyoung whimpers, bottom lip trembling. He doesn't ask why.

He holds Soonyoung and lets him cry.

____

“Will you tell Soonyoung what happened in this life?”

Jeon Wonwoo looks up from his desk. “Would you like me to?” Seokmin nods. “I’ll tell him everything when it’s his time.”

When he lowers his eyes to the table, only one life remains. He doesn’t even get the chance to reach out to touch it before the world collapses at his eyes.

____

When he thinks he’s thrown into his last life, the last chance of playing Wonwoo’s games, there’s a flash at his eyes, lightning dulled out by the clouds beneath his feet. Meters away, he traces out Soonyoung, _his_ Soonyoung, the first Soonyoung he ever learned and came to know, holding onto Wonwoo’s shoulders tight. Fragility at his grip, he thinks Soonyoung will topple at any second, and he wants to run up to him, hold him up and hold him close.

Soonyoung scans around, frantic, mouth working a thousand words a second and veins rising up rivers at his neck.

He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know if he has permission to move.

But then Soonyoung searches around. When their eyes meet for a split second, Soonyoung lifts up a finger at him, turns back to Jeon Wonwoo in that black suit, tears at his eyes and a sob at his wake. Despite the long line bordering onto one side of the clouds, close to the ocean’s view from above and the world moving fast under his feet, all he sees is Soonyoung.

All he hears is Soonyoung’s voice, loud in his ears, as if he’s right beside him, “I’ll live all his lives for him if it will make him happy.”

_Life: 0_

When Seokmin catches his reflection, skin and bones, rain clinging onto his hair don’t agree with what he sees. A stack of a folded blanket and a pillow sit on the reclining chair next to his bed. Beeps protrude into his ears, monotonous and continuous, sounding lifeless despite reminding him the life coursing all over him. White walls and sunlight suffocating his entire vision, a green line jumping at the corner of his periphery disturbs the streak of closing his eyes against the blinding white. Invisible claws at his chest, every breath he stifles moves inside a shell.

A pair of red-rimmed eyes from the other side of the room shocks his memories disarray.

He scans up the figure at the door once, back down again, high up once more, until he can pick out where pale skin usually lays among the scars, those gentle hands that traced him out now skinned down a layer, the stars in Soonyoung’s eyes swallowed in the dim of scratches, a bruise on his cheeks. His eyes latch onto his for a moment and even then, Soonyoung refuses to move anywhere past the door of the hospital room. He outlines his mother behind him, her hand baring the slightest of holds on his shoulder and her other hand wrapping around Soonyoung’s unscathed one, lifting it up, as if telling him which direction to look, which direction to go.

A cursory glance at each other, not long enough this time to decipher where hands meet and when they separate, is all they need for everything to fall apart. The beeping hikes up into a blaring beat as Soonyoung’s shoulders shudder beneath summer heat, as his mother reaches out to hug him too late. His knees surrender, just for Seokmin’s mother’s own knees to follow along, follow him down onto the floor. Sinking onto his legs, his mother whispers something to him that can’t stalk to his end of the room, tender but solid hands on his cheeks to look into his eyes and ensure Soonyoung can hear her words, can _see_ her words. When Soonyoung nods, he stands up, guides his mother up along the way, and his mother offers a faint smile before she says she will leave them alone, that she will come back in a bit.

Soonyoung ghosts out an “Okay” that barely surfaces to his ears.

When his mother leaves, just before the click of the door shut behind her, the unheard “Wait, Auntie, please” scratches its way out of his throat.

But Soonyoung doesn’t budge a centimeter. Hesitant hand reaching up for the doorknob before dropping his hand, he lingers, as if waiting for the door to open, back towards him. It’s enough of an angle to capture him hugging himself and stifling the shaking of his shoulders.

Seokmin’s voice wears out just to call his name, but it earns the older craning his head towards the floor, lowering his eyes farther away from him. He turns around without bringing his head up any higher, pads around the room until Seokmin can mark out the tears searing down each cheek, can count them shattering across the floor. When he calls out to him once more, it’s all he needs for Soonyoung to take a deep breath in and shuffle his way to the side of the bed.

When he reaches out to him, a sting shoots up his ribs and the sore of his arm, shrinks him to wincing at the pain and regretting reaching out. Sharp inhales can only do so much, closing his eyes against the pain, even as Soonyoung breaks off the lonely embrace to comfort himself and jerks forward in an instant, holds onto his arm and helps him lower it down so slowly. So carefully that Seokmin thinks it isn’t the first time he has done this for him.

With his breathing leveled off and his eyes fluttering back open, the touch of a palm on his face speaks to him like their past, like all of their pasts.

Soonyoung’s voice hollows out above the sniff. “Do you know where you are, Seokmin?”

He remembers the car that night and nods, lets the tear fall from his own eyes, feels a thumb wipe it off.

The world must have pitied them so much. Jeon Wonwoo must have pitied them so, so much.

When they kiss for the first time, it’s tears lining the seam of their lips, apologies spelled out in the way Soonyoung doesn’t pull him any closer, no hints of desperation to hold onto Seokmin like he usually can be in their first and past lives. Soonyoung’s hands capture his face so faint that he wonders if he wants to hold him at all.

But then it’s wishes ungranted when Seokmin tries to reach up a second time, like he always does, and wants to bring Soonyoung much closer than the metal railings and above the tubes disappearing behind them. He wants to card his digits through his hair and run fingertips all over his face and study him to convince himself that it’s _his_ Soonyoung, the first Soonyoung he fell in love with, but it all hurts to challenge even a centimeter less of space between them.

Soonyoung breaks their lips apart just as he falls back on the bed, groans at the shard of pain hitting him all at once again. Hands at his outstretched arms so gentle at his hand and shoulder, Soonyoung helps him again to lower his arms down, only to thread their hands together.

His entire world runs on Soonyoung when he bends over the railing to sink his forehead over his, eyes claiming a fountain but never sounding out a hitch of a drop. Whispers of “You don’t have to move” and “This is enough, Seokmin,” Soonyoung reaches up higher to touch but stops somewhere close to his eyes, perhaps to the scratches sewing up his skin there, a reflection. “Does it hurt anywhere?” he whispers, eyes scanning everywhere.

As the question melts away for an answer, he doesn’t think about _just_ realizing the casts around his chest and the one on his arm, bandages wrapped around his leg or how if he wakes a deep breath, it burns all the same as reaching his arms up to him. He delves into the world in front of him, to the Soonyoung he first came to know two decades ago and wanted to dive deeper to know all over again. The Soonyoung he pictured finding every morning before everything spiraled into finding each other without a map. It’s the Soonyoung he first learned by heart, first learned a little something about love. It’s the first Soonyoung he fell in love with.

Seokmin lets the tear fall, flinches at it going straight into an open scratch, the prick from it spreading, and whispers, “Not at all.”

____

He discovers that talking to the doctors and nurses becomes easier with Soonyoung beside him or somewhere in the room. Slotted between those visits of staff that end with telling Seokmin how they still can’t believe he pulled through so quickly and wishing for a smooth recovery in the long run, he listens in on Soonyoung’s streams of stories and “Would it be weird if I came back to work like this?”

“ _Soonyoung_ ,” Seokmin pictures another needle poking into his skin, refusing to allow the laugh to escape because it still hurts like that first day, “you would be the perfect model for your work.”

He lifts a corner of his lips up, the first instance of a smile’s semblance in this life. “Like this? Halfway beat-up?”

____

They’ve all been waiting for this day, his parents and Soonyoung all the same. When the time comes for the doctor to announce Seokmin’s discharge, he wakes up to Soonyoung laying out a pile of his clothes at the end of the bed, smile keeping the tear from falling right out of his eye.

“We’re taking you home,” is like a lullaby between them, and he leans back on the bed, closes his eyes to the sound of Soonyoung’s tracking all over the room.

With an arm hooked into Soonyoung’s free one, no cast at his chest stopping him from pulling the older closer to his side, he limps his way to the bathroom there, heeds to the spot Soonyoung pats to sit down on and “Let me help you change.”

The hospital gown drops around his ankles, and he basks into Soonyoung’s giggle when he tries to kick it away, toes knocking at Soonyoung’s knee. Even with fending off the tasks of changing him with one hand, Soonyoung surprises him with buttoning his shirt up to his neck, putting away the pair of shoes in trade for a pair of slippers instead. 

Discharging Seokmin means listening to his mother scold Soonyoung with no harm whatsoever about wanting to push the wheelchair. His parents guide them out to the parking lot, finding their way out of the hospital with his mother risking in laughing about the fact that they forgot where they parked.

“We must be too excited that you’re coming home,” his mother pipes, inspecting the entire first floor as his father consults a floor map.

But even surrounded in the comforts of the home he grew up in, Seokmin wakes up from his nap with the question of when exactly will the world take Soonyoung away from him.

____

The task of washing Seokmin falls into the hands of Soonyoung behind his parents’ back. Soonyoung always perches himself at the edge of the bathtub and lets Seokmin sit between his legs. Careful hands massaging his scalp, more careful hands when he rinses the soap from the crevices and crooks of his skin and hair. When his eyes trip into the brink of falling asleep, Soonyoung offers the faintest of kisses to his temple.

He would be lying if he said he wouldn’t mind it this way. Because these moments also comprise of Soonyoung staring at surgical scars marking up his chest and Seokmin reminding him not to look at them, “Please just pretend, Soonyoung.”

Soon after they ran out of excuses as to why Soonyoung sleeps on the floor at Seokmin’s bedside almost every day, the bathtub water lurches to the brim after he watches Soonyoung’s own clothes join his pile on the tiled floors. Uncertain hands slip off one article of clothing at a time until all that stops them from bare touches of skin all over is the plastic wrapped around each of their casts.

Soonyoung mentions that it’s easier this way.

“What’s easier?” he asks, smiling more for the bubbles he clumped on Soonyoung’s hair.

He watches Soonyoung’s throat lock up the swallow, the hand towel stopping still at his neck. Instead, Soonyoung runs his thumb there. “Washing you like this. It saves water.”

Soonyoung winks at the last remark, and Seeokmin crumbles into a laughing fit at the absurdity of his answer, the first one in a long time, and the sound is too good to be real for them. He doesn’t realize that halfway through that laughter, the joy of the moment, the light in his heart, tunnels out into the urge to cry, the urge to choke it back, and his futile attempts in stopping them when it all singes his chest to do so.

____

At the porch, his eyes refuse to resort into anything but the last fragments of that road in front of him, in that same path of the car. Soonyoung keeps him company as his parents run a circus between work and grabbing everything Seokmin may need from the pharmacy or the doctor. He doesn’t keep his eyes company, though, as he stares at his lap.

“Can I talk about our past lives?” hesitates out of Soonyong’s lips. He considers it for a second but since it’s the first time he brought it up in this life, he gives it a go, gives him a nod. “Wonwoo told me about my last life,” he begins, breath barely keeping him steady. “Did you really stay when I couldn’t remember anything?” He gives him a nod a second time. “So when I said I love him, I was really saying it to you?” He gives him a nod a third time.

“To be fair,” he talks just to placate the tears gathering at Soonyoung’s eyes, “you asked me if I’ve ever been in love. And when I said I love him, I was talking about you.”

When the moon rises and washes out the light blues, washes in the dark and lights up the streets in stars, they still refuse to move from the porch.

“Seokmin?”

“Yeah?”

Soonyoung takes a deep breath in, contemplates the next words, and he wouldn’t blame him if he takes them back to his thoughts. “This is my last life.”

He finds the stars in Soonyoung’s eyes again. “This is my last life, too.”

Soonyoung finally peers up to him and for the first time in so long, they share a knowing smile.

**Author's Note:**

> i snatched the title from ["again" by bruno mars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3jUme7_5wY), which was never officially released
> 
> thank you so much for reading! a big thank you again to the mods for hosting this fest and for their generous patience throughout!
> 
> this is gonna be my last fic for a while, so this fest definitely pushed me to write ;; please take care and i hope your days will be kind to you


End file.
